Special evening lecture: Professor Wim H. van Harten – 29 November

Value Transformation in Dutch Hospitals: Portfolios, Pathways and New Models of Care

Visiting Professor Wim H. van Harten will present a special evening lecture during his visit to Australia. Wim H. van Harten is the CEO of Rijnstate (general) Hospital in Arnhem, a large teaching hospital with an annual expenditure of € 460 million and around 4500 employees, of whom around 275 are medical specialists and 130 MDs in specialist training.

The presentation will provide insights on the concentration of health services from a European perspective, along with networks in oncology and the development of hospitals taking responsibility for delivery of specialised care at home.

Professor Wim H. van Harten MD, PhD, MPH

Wim H. van Harten spent 5 years in Cameroon after his graduation as M.D. and specialisation in tropical medicine. On returning from Africa he focused on public health and health administration. He obtained a degree in community medicine/public health while working as Chief Medical Advisor of a major health insurance company (1986-1992). He completed his PhD on quality management in health care (1997) and started a research group in close cooperation with the University of Twente.

In June 2001, he became Member of the Executive Board of the Netherlands Cancer Institute – Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital (NKI-AVL), a prominent European Comprehensive Cancer Center in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, being in charge of Organisation & Management. The NKI is the only designated Comprehensive Cancer center in the Netherlands with an annual expenditure of over € 300 million. From 2005 he was acting as Research Group leader at the Division of Psychosocial Research and Epidemiology at the NKI.

Since 2001 he is part-time professor on Quality Management and Health Care Technology at the department of Health Technology and Services Research of the School of Management and Governance at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. After serving on the board of the Organization of European Cancer Institutes (OECI) for a number of years, he served as President of the OECI from 2011-2014. He is a member of the Accreditation and Designation Group of the OECI. He is one of the founders of this system and chaired reviews of major centers like Cambridge, Manchester/Christies, Helsinki University and Oslo University. He chairs the OECI working group on health economics.

From 2008 – 2014 he was chosen to serve as Board member of the Netherlands Hospital Association with the portfolio of innovation, drug costs and quality issues.

In December 2015 he started as CEO of Rijnstate (general) Hospital in Arnhem. In the annual insurers survey on 2015, Rijnstate ranked fourth in annual patient volume in the Netherlands. Presently a large 10-year renovation investment plan is underway involving total restructuring real estate and facilities, innovating clinical in-patient services, upgrading R&D structure and heavy IT, EMR and data mining investments. Rijnstate serves as a business school ‘care study’ of IESE/Barcelona in its 2018 curriculum in The Hospital of the Future.